Tom Doherty, president and publisher of Tor Books, worked his way up through the sales force ranks at Simon & Schuster and was mentored by Betty and Ian Ballantine when they launched the first science fiction and fantasy line in the country. Still, in 1985, he dreamed of a better way to publish science fiction. “I thought it would be unique to do something which took a very broad view of science fiction and fantasy, and by a broad view I mean from the prehistoric past to the far future.”
What separates his company from the pack is Tor’s willingness to accommodate staff. “I thought by structuring the jobs more openly,” Doherty says, “I could attract the right people and do something that was really fine, because creativity is what counted.”
He gives as example editor Harriet McDougal, who’d worked with Doherty at Ace and Tempo, but wanted to move from New York to a home she inherited in Charleston, S.C., which had been in her family since before the Civil War. Doherty notes, “I said, ‘Harriet, we’ve got an 800-number, we’ll get you a computer and a modem.’ And she liked the idea.” He mentions another editor, Beth Meacham, who ran the SF department at Berkley. “She dreamed of living in the desert. She had arthritis and was convinced she’d feel better in a hot, dry climate. So I said, ‘Great, Beth, come join us and live in the desert.’” It’s no surprise, then, that Tor Books has won the Lucas poll for best publisher for 27 years in a row since 1988.
Looking back over the past 35 years, Doherty notes the press’s biggest single title was Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, originally published as a novelette in an SF magazine. When Card started writing the sequel, Speaker from the Dead (1994), for Tor Books, he realized he hadn’t laid enough groundwork in his first book. He asked Doherty if he could expand Ender’s Game and publish it with Tor as a full novel, which turned out to be a great idea. “We’re selling over a quarter of a million copies of it on the backlist, and last year it was back on the New York Times bestseller list.”
One of the more recent developments is Tor’s new relationship with NASA, which approached the publisher as part of the agency’s mission to get more of America’s youth interested in studying science and technology. The first book developed out of this venture is Pillar to the Sky, by William R. Forstchen, which came out this past January and features a space elevator, a tower to the sky that harnesses the sun’s energy and supplies cheap energy to the world. “They bring us great ideas and give us free scientific consultation and to those ideas we bring great storytellers,” Doherty says.
In honor of Tor’s 35th year, publicity director Patty Garcia has come up with a “Class of 2015” concept to welcome new writers into the Tor family, complete with “class superlatives,” like “Most Artistic,” which describes Ilana Myer (a book critic at Huffington Post writing under her real name, Ilana Teitelbaum). Myer says, “I actually set out to write Last Song Before Night [Tor Books, Sept.] to explore what art means to me, so they were very perceptive to give me the ‘most artistic’ label.”
Then there’s “Class Rebel” Seth Dickinson, who was studying social neuroscience at NYU before embarking on a writing career. “I’m prepared to be rebellious,” he jokes. He describes his book, The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Sept.), as “a novel about colonialism, tyranny, and freedom. It’s Game of Thrones meets Guns, Germs and Steel.”
You can meet Myer and Dickinson today at a panel, “Tor: The Next Generation,” at the Uptown Stage, 10:45–11:45 a.m., where they will play a rousing game of “Would You Rather: The SFF Edition” with host John Scalzi (The End of All Things, Aug.) along with other Tor newcomers Lawrence M. Schoen (Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard, Dec.) and Fran Wilde (Updraft, Sept.). Later Wilde and Schoen will be signing galleys at Table 8, 1– 2 p.m., and Myer and Dickinson will be there, 2–3 p.m.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled Lawrence M. Schoen's surname in one instance.
